…for me, anyway.  Many folks have been sounding the long, slow death march of the printed page for a long while now.  Certainly with the demise of the Rocky Mountain News (part of the favorite Sunday morning ritual in this house), and the troubles of many other papers around the country, it is more and more clear the country and society has moved on.  Jeffrey Cole of the USC Center for the Digital Future believes this - I saw him present at the Colorado Spring iMedia Conference in June - and they think all but perhaps five will be gone within 3-5 years.

I’m not sure I believed it. I thought there might always be a place for the paper…on Sundays mornings, sifting through the deals, the ads, the comics…looking through the sports to see if my Chiefs would be on TV. But after tonight, I don’t think so.  Tonight we had some of the more violent storms hit the Denver area that I’ve ever experienced…and I’m from Kansas so you know I’ve seen some doozies. But it looked like a hurricane out there…like I was on my front porch, standing next to Niagra Falls.  Crazy.  Our satellite went out due to the rain, so we were out our primary source of information - and I was legitimately concern I wouldn’t hear the train roar of a tornado over the deluge. So I get on Twitter, as well as weather.com and weatherunderground.com (?) to track the progress of the storm as it moved southeast across the metro area and right toward where we live.  On Twitter was @MistyMontano, working the desk for cbs4denver.com as well as @zsazsa, tweeting away, letting me know where the storm was, how serious it was going to be, etc.  After the storm, after some back and forth over said tornado concerns with @mistymontano and things had calmed down…@denverpost finally tweets in with the message “strong, fast thunderstorm hits metro area.”  This is after the storm had passed, after #Denver was a trending topic on Twitter, after I had learned everything I needed to know to keep my family safe (as well as geek out a little bit over the power of mother nature).  After the story was over.

And thats where we are today, isn’t it?  Its not enough to tell people what happened after it happened.  People want to know, and will expect to know will increasing frequency, what happened, while its happening.  People want to hear from each other - from real people, what they are experiencing, how much hail are they getting, etc. People want to share what they’re seeing as well. Reading about something that already happened, from a singular, source is much, much less interesting.

Reminds me in a sense when I worked at a Satellite TV outfit, and all the talk was “on demand - we gotta have one demand.”  And now, everyone has more instant options for entertainment that they can use.  So the opportunity is there for newspapers to adapt and get more in the real time news, but its not in their DNA.  It is however, in news stations DNA - which is why I think they’re more likely to make the changes necessary to stay successful in the social web.  They’ve understood real time and capturing audience reaction better than their printed colleagues ever could.  And this is the heart at why I think Prof. Cole is right.  The world doesn’t need/want the printed page anymore.